Limited Government Is

The Investigations That Could Derail Hillary Clinton’s Nomination

The mainstream media are content with giving Mrs. Clinton a pass on her many scandals, downplaying or minimizing information that could potentially damage her campaign. At the same time, media organizations work to bolster her air of inevitability as the chosen candidate by repeatedly drawing attention to the size of her lead in terms of the number of delegates she and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) each have.

After voting in 19 states, the latest delegate count shows Hillary Clinton with 1,130 delegates to 499 for Sanders. But those numbers could be misleading. Clinton has among her delegates 458 superdelegates, meaning elected officials and party officials who can vote for whomever they want, and who comprise about 30 percent of the total number of delegates needed to win the nomination. They have announced that they will vote for her, while just 22 superdelegates have declared support for Sanders. Superdelegates were established after the 1972 election in which Democratic candidate George McGovern won just one state, in order to give the party establishment a better chance to control the nominating process and avoid a repeat of that situation.

It is important to remember, however, that in December 2007 candidate Barack Obama had only 63 superdelegates to Mrs. Clinton’s 169. Yet in 2008 President Obama won the Democratic presidential primary with 463 superdelegates to Mrs. Clinton’s 257. Superdelegates are usually inclined to lend their vote to the candidate who is already winning.

It is no wonder that media reports emphasize Mrs. Clinton’s electability over Sanders. After all, the liberal media have put the full force of their reporting behind ensuring her campaign’s success, even though Sanders is making a surprisingly strong showing so far, having won eight of the 19 states that have held primaries or caucuses. He clearly has the enthusiasm factor going for him.

But the Clinton camp has other things to worry about as well. Bryan Pagliano, who set up Mrs. Clinton’s private email server at the start of her time as secretary of state, recently was granted immunity by the Justice Department. National Review’s Andy McCarthy notes that a “proffer agreement signals that an active grand-jury investigation may well be underway, and if it is not yet underway, it soon will be.”

“The Post says of the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s mishandling of classified information, ‘there is no indication that prosecutors have convened a grand jury…to subpoena testimony or documents, which would require the participation of a U.S. attorney’s office,’” he writes.

McCarthy calls this “doubly wrong” because “a proffer agreement—is a powerful indication either that there is an active grand-jury investigation or that such an investigation is imminent,” and a district attorney is not necessary.

A recent Washington Post analysis has detailed some of Mrs. Clinton’s reckless behavior as secretary of state.

“Hillary Clinton wrote 104 emails that she sent using her private server while secretary of state that the government has since said contain classified information…” reports the Post. “The finding is the first accounting of the Democratic presidential front-runner’s personal role in placing information now considered sensitive into insecure email during her State Department tenure.”

While the Post does recognize that for “roughly three-quarters of those cases, officials have determined that material Clinton herself wrote in the body of email messages is classified,” the paper also expresses skepticism that this information should have been classified.

“Several [diplomats] said in interviews that they thought the State Department’s review process relied on an overly broad interpretation of ­public-records laws that restrict release of certain information involving relations with foreign governments,” reports the Post. This would include “real-time information shared with them by foreign government officials using their own insecure email accounts or open phone lines, or in public places such as hotel lobbies where it could have been overheard.”

As we have reported, such information is born classified because it involves confidential information received from foreign government contacts.

Mrs. Clinton and her supporters continually cast the investigations into her corruption and lies as motivated by right-wing groups intent on ruining her political career. Yet now they even boldly claim that the government, headed by President Obama, is also biased against Clinton.

Clinton campaign chair John Podesta recently stated that an anonymous source—a “whistleblower”—criticized the State Department Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) conduct, arguing that this investigation has an “anti-Clinton bias,”according to The Daily Caller. Ironically, the IG, Steve Linick, was appointed by Democratic President Obama.

The Associated Press’ White House Correspondent Julie Pace told Fox News’ Chris Wallace on March 6 that she believes that President Obama is backing Mrs. Clinton, and discouraging a criminal indictment. “But the President of the United States has come out and said that there’s nothing that’s going to come out in an investigation that will prove to be—to be criminal,” she said.

These statements by the White House are both inappropriate, and quite revealing. The President should not be pre-judging the FBI investigation. His spokesman has claimed that neither the FBI nor the Justice Department has kept the President apprised of the investigation. But since the record clearly shows that President Obama had direct email communications with Mrs. Clinton’s unsecured email account on at least a dozen occasions, he could certainly become ensnared in this national security scandal if the investigation is allowed to move forward. Obama also faces the dilemma of what an indictment of Mrs. Clinton would do to the Democrats’ chances of winning the White House in November.

Mrs. Clinton appears confident that the two FBI investigations are going nowhere. “This is the same security review that has been going on since last spring,” Mrs. Clinton told CNBC. “I know the Republicans are engaging in a lot of wishful thinking, but this is not something anyone should be worried about.”

The investigation is no security review. The FBI, with well over 100 agents involved in the investigation, is determining whether criminal charges are in order. That is what they do.

Yet again, Mrs. Clinton told MSNBC that she is “personally not concerned” and that she thinks “there will be a resolution of the security inquiry.”

“No other American politicians—even ones as corrupt as Richard Nixon, or as hated by partisans as George W. Bush—have fostered the creation of a permanent multimillion-dollar cottage industry devoted to attacking them,” observes the liberal Atlantic magazine in an article on the Clinton scandals. Yet even The Atlantic describes Mrs. Clinton’s Emailgate as looking “more serious all the time.” The AP’s Pace also said that Mrs. Clinton still does not have a “good answer” to questions about her email server.

Mrs. Clinton is being investigated by more than just the FBI. She also faces inquiries from the “inspector general of the State Department, the inspector general of the intelligence agencies, the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security and the House Select Committee on Benghazi,” according to The New York Times.

Part of the investigation has to do with public corruption, i.e., using her office of the secretary of state to benefit her family’s foundation, as well as lining the pockets of herself and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

One case worth looking into is that of Laureate International Universities. As Peter Schweizer reported last year in Breitbart, “Newly released financial disclosures reveal Bill Clinton received $16.46 million in payments from a George Soros-backed for-profit education company, as Hillary Clinton’s State Department funneled tens of millions of dollars to a group run by the company’s chairman.” Shortly after that was disclosed, “Bill Clinton abruptly resigned” from the board.

That is just one of many examples brought to light in Schweizer’s book, Clinton Cash, that demonstrates how the Clintons used Hillary’s position as secretary of state to enrich themselves.

While Mrs. Clinton continues to benefit from mainstream media favoritism, the investigations into her and her aides’ misconduct continues. Even liberal outlets such as The Atlantic are beginning to realize that the charges she faces are serious, and will grow more serious as time goes on. This will only cause a more and more desperate media to overlook as many of these scandals as they can as they proceed on their mission to get her elected in November.

I am a graduate, in retrospect, of a very good “old school” style of journalism, journalism school in December, 1978, who for almost a year could not ever get a job in Journalism. Instead, because I was engaged to get married in July, 1979, I had “to settle” for an always job-friendly career in healthcare, which I just retired from two years ago at age 59 and a half. I continue to work as a federal employee, but not in healthcare. The truth of the matter is that, once a writer, always a writer and really since high school in the 1960s/1970s, I have never stopped writing regardless of what my day job was. This has never been more the case than in the last year since the current presidential campaign began and greatly involves something which was science fiction in the 1960s, 1970s, and even deep into the 1980s called the internet and, more recently and specifically, Facebook. (Forget about ever getting a newspaper or magazine editor rarely wanting to print your letter to the editor.) For years, and increasingly, I say to the TV or when I read something in print or on the Web, why do I (the one who could never get a paid job in your profession), have to be the one to think and write about this or that political point (with very rare exceptions), such as your above story.

I am very glad, wordpress.com wrote the following up-date about the two FBI and one OIG investigations on going (and, hopefully, soon productive) about Hillary very suspicious up-to 22 potentially felonious “above top secret” unsecured e-mails- now that she is really headed for the Democrat nomination! Why aren’t these type of stories more available in the mainstream media and even on Fox news, who I have learned own up to 95% of all of the USA’s radio stations (so much for the “liberal-controlled, lame stream” media)? Even though I have been a centrist Democrat for over 12 years, probably because of my journalistic training (and where I live), I listen to what the ultra-left, ultra-right and everyone in-between has to say as long as they are human about it. As there should be many more on-going stories about Hillary’s three investigations, why isn’t there more reported by anyone in the media about Trump’s true record of bankruptcies?, does he hire and employ under-paid illegals in his hotels or not casinos and other properties or not?, two days ago on CNN, there was a story on the early morning news about Trump Mortgage started in early 2007 to help people with their mortgages which folded less than 18 months later when the Mortgage Loan crisis (directly and quickly contradicted by a Trump statement-what is the real deal here or not, without the political spin, thank you?) which led to other horrible financial events then a near collapse of our entire economy the last two years of Bush/Cheney (No, it’s not what Obama has done to our economy- it’s what Obama, his Administration and sane/reasonable Republicans have done to the Bush/Cheney economy of 2007-2008). Forget about who is culpable for the chaos at the Trump campaign rallies for a minute- let’s hear some more details about Trump’s four to eight or more of his 500 or more companies before we nominate this guy or not to most likely completely destroy the Republican Party THEN let him “make America great again.” I personally still favor Bernie Sanders- truly an independent- the longest one to ever serve in Congress, but had to declare either Democrat or Republican to run for President who is a Socialist which simply means “for the common good” and is as evil as the Israeli kibbutzim which both Bernie and I have lived and worked on, the evils of Social Security for the past 80 years Medicare for the past 50 years, your local police and fire departments and even our military are run on socialistic principles. Many of the countries of Europe are socialized medicine where all of their citizens are covered for half the cost of the USA’s healthcare debacle I worked most of the past 36 years in since college and most of these countries are much higher than #53 globally where the USA now is for health outcomes. The word socialism has been very unfairly demonized and greatly misunderstood- often for political advantage. but would really welcome many more stories, like the one above on both Hillary on the Left and Trump on the Right before either one of these still very questionable characters ever make it to a nomination. I notice I am the first one to make a comment on this story from six days ago- for that reason maybe the readers of this comment can forgive the length of this and I welcome any and every comment to my comment.